In modern dairy farm industry there are continuous research and development activities in order to improve the efficiency of various activities such as machine milking, which, inter alia, involves increased milk yield and reduced milking time by increasing the throughput of cows in the milking facility. A major trend in this respect is an increased degree of automation of the various activities. For instance, machine milking may be performed by milking robots in a completely automated manner. Such an automatic milking system may take care of milking, feeding, milk inspection, milk sampling, animal traffic, etcetera in a large area wherein the dairy animals are moving and are visiting the milking machine voluntarily.
An automated milking machine involves heavy expenditure and has a limited milk harvesting capacity. Thus, animals having a high milk production should be allowed to be milked more often than animals having a low milk production. The operation and use of an automated milking machine, which animals are visiting on a voluntary basis, in order to obtain an optimum overall dairy farm performance is an arduous task. An objective is here to safeguard maximum milk production, while, naturally, ethical aspects as well as animal care are considered.
WO 01/93666 (DELAVAL HOLDING AB) discloses a method of automatically milking animals, such as cows, which are allowed to move freely in an area intended therefore and to visit individually a milking station comprising a fully automatic milking machine and an animal identification system. The milking station may comprise a feeding device provided in the front end of the milking station, the purpose of which being to entice a cow to enter the milking station and to make her stand still during at least the attachment of the teat cups.
K. de Koning and Y. van de Vorst state in Automatic milking changes and chances, Proceedings of the British Mastitis Conference (2002) Brockworth, pp 68-80 Institute for Animal Health/Milk Development Council, that automatic milking relies on the cow's motivation to visit the automatic milking system more or less voluntarily. The main motive for a cow to visit the automatic milking system is the supply of concentrates; therefore automatic milking systems are typically equipped with concentrate dispensers.